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As they were getting ready for bed that night, Blue brushing his teeth and she brushing out her hair, Hannah said, “Cass tried to get me to go to Rio for Rosh Hashanah. Isn’t that absurd?”
“You should go,” Blue said from the bathroom after spitting out his toothpaste. “What else are you doing?”
“Uh, celebrating the High Holy Days with my family? Running the inn?” Why did he always make her work sound disposable?
“Cass ran the inn for decades while still managing to travel all the time.”
“Well, I’m not Cass,” she said defensively. Maybe Cass was brilliant enough to run a successful business while spending half her year around the world, but Hannah needed to focus on operations here. She loved guest management, making sure everyone had everything they needed.
Also, she hated travel.
“I told her she should take you,” Hannah told him.
He snorted, and she turned around from where she was sitting on the bed to look at him. “What? Why not you? With Miri gone, it’s just you and me from the original crew. I can’t go, and I don’t want to, and you would love it.”
“Yeah, I’m sure we’d have an amazing time, the two of us,” he snarked. “Why don’t you and I go to Rio, and leave Cass here to run the business she still owns?”
She shook her head. He always looked for a reason to be mad at Cass.
“What, Nan?” he demanded, his hackles obviously up. “What about us having an epic romantic trip to Rio de Janeiro pisses you off?”
“Why does it have to be some epic romantic trip? Why can’t we eat kugel in our second-nicest sweaters and then sleep in our own beds? This isn’t a fairy tale, Blue! We’re not in some sort of fated love story! We’re just a regular couple, trying to figure out what the fuck to do for the holidays!”
“We can have any life we want!” he yelled. “And I want more than kugel in our second-nicest sweaters!”
This fight wasn’t about Rio or kugel, and she knew it. And he knew it. It was the same fight that they kept picking at, a scab they couldn’t let heal over. But she couldn’t stop herself. It was like, once she’d started them on this track, there was no way off the train but to ride it to the end.
“There’s nothing wrong with a fairy-tale love! People wait all their lives for the kind of love we have. People write songs and poems about it, yearn for it, die for it. We get to have it! Why do you hate that so much?”
He was pacing in their small room, tugging at his hair. He didn’t understand how being Levi’s Hannah had overwritten her whole identity, how desperate she was to be allowed to find herself.
Why didn’t he know her enough to understand that?
“I didn’t choose it!”
He went still. “I know you wouldn’t have chosen me if you’d had a choice, Hannah. You’ve made that perfectly clear.”
“Shut UP, you absolute asshole.” She wanted to scream into the night forever. “IT IS NOT ABOUT YOU. I never got to choose! Anything! I went from being stuck with my parents to falling in love with you, and I never got to see who I would be if I were just Hannah! Would I have flirted with a bunch of people and gotten to know myself better in the middle of crying over breakups? Would I have gotten really into yoga? Would I have joined a choir? I don’t know who I am because I was always obsessing about you!”
“Why don’t you ever ask yourself who you would have been if you hadn’t fallen in love with Carrigan’s, Hannah?” he demanded, still stalking the room like a caged cat. “Because it’s not me who’s keeping you from finding yourself! You’re not tied to me—you’re chained to this fucking farm.”
A tiny voice whispered that he was right—that she wasn’tchoosingCarrigan’s, she just couldn’t leave. She lashed out, as much at the voice as at him.
“Carrigan’s IS who I am,” Hannah cried. “Why would I want to be free of that?!”
“Why would you want to be free of me?” Blue thundered.
“I don’t want to be free of you. I just. Want. To. Have. Had. A. Chance. To. Choose. You.”
Hannah didn’t even know how they’d gotten into this fight. She never understood how they ended up screaming at each other. No matter how hard she tried to not bring up subjects that would explode on them, somehow they both always ended up with all their claws out, trying to see which one of them could draw the most blood.
Stomping up to him, she pulled his mouth to hers. He pushed her back up against the door, and they fought with their tongues until they forgot about fighting.
And Rio.
Chapter 18
Hannah
